The present invention relates to the administration of a network, and more particularly to the diagnosis of faults within the network.
With the advent of the use of networks of computers in increasing numbers, greater attention is being paid to the manner in which such networks are administered. For example, there are a number of commercial technology and services packages, or “solutions” available currently which provide for the administration of a remotely located network, and these solutions provide greater opportunities for the devolution of responsibility for the maintenance and operation of networks. Thus for example a network serving one commercial organisation, whose area of commerce is not related to information technology or its management, and which is not therefore intrinsically competent within this field may be administered remotely under contract by another independent commercial organisation which specialises in network management. In order to be commercially viable, many such solutions incorporate some form of fault diagnosis software, to provide a remotely located administrator with an ability to diagnose faults within the network.
One desirable way of providing such a capability is to analyse the network in its constituent parts (i.e. both hardware and software) or “resources”, and to consider the various states of operability of each of the resources which may have a role in causing a particular symptom. A problem with such a system however is that a large network, e.g. a network of a multinational company for example will typically have in the region of 1 million resources. If each resource's operability is considered, even in the essentially theoretical model where each resource has only two operability states (functioning and non functioning), there are 21,000,000 (or roughly 10300,000) possible permutations of operability states for the entire network. Because of the limitations on computational power (for example even if quantum computing were used, there are insufficient atoms within the universe to provide the requisite computational capability to deal with such a big number, since there are currently thought to be only in the region of 1081 photons in the universe), it has therefore not been feasible to use such an approach in fault diagnosis.